He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
---Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Monday, March 01, 2010

Is Anyone Normal?

Allen Frances, chairman of the commission that drafted the Fourth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association:

As chairman of the task force that created the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), which came out in 1994, I learned from painful experience how small changes in the definition of mental disorders can create huge, unintended consequences.

Our panel tried hard to be conservative and careful but inadvertently contributed to three false "epidemics" -- attention deficit disorder, autism and childhood bipolar disorder. Clearly, our net was cast too wide and captured many "patients" who might have been far better off never entering the mental health system.

The first draft of the next edition of the DSM, posted for comment with much fanfare last month, is filled with suggestions that would multiply our mistakes and extend the reach of psychiatry dramatically deeper into the ever-shrinking domain of the normal. This wholesale medical imperialization of normality could potentially create tens of millions of innocent bystanders who would be mislabeled as having a mental disorder. The pharmaceutical industry would have a field day -- despite the lack of solid evidence of any effective treatments for these newly proposed diagnoses.

I've said all along that the wholesale drugging of the nation's children was a money-making scam by the pharmaceutical industry. When your definition of "normal" excludes 25-30% of all male children, you need to seriously rethink your definition of "normal." And now we have the new DSM that will define, what? 50% of all male children as having a mental disorder? And with Obamacare we all get to participate in lobotomizing around half the male population and no small percentage of the females. It won't make us competitive with China and India, but the upside is that we'll all be too stupid and drugged up to care.